- Forex bucket shops that pretend to be brokers but really trade against you. Many times killing accounts with big bid/ask spreads.
- Using attractive female photos to push some service off on traders.
- Trading newsletter writers that don’t even trade. They issue a lot of buy signals then cherry pick the winners to tout to the public.
- Penny stock pump and dumps. If you trade stocks with almost no liquidity and that are under a penny you are going to have a bad time. However there are some legitimate opportunities to invest in penny stocks such as learning strategies and opportunities through an educational portal–an example is Penny Stocks Lab.
- Mutual fund managers that take big management fees and under perform their benchmarks.
- Twitter traders that delete their losing trade tweets. Their egos may be a problem.
- Ads selling the can’t lose ‘Holy Grail’ trading system.
- Talking heads spewing out useless opinions on financial television.
- Buy and hold equities being taught as the best investing system.
- The efficient market theory and that it is impossible to beat the market over the long term.